Gene's paper follows the first steps of literary research in finding possible primary parallels between Hawthorne's notes and writings and Digby's works from the 17th century, and he reviews Reid's relevant article which argues that Digby also served as a source for "The Birthmark." But Gene's wide claim for Hawthorne's "knowledge of Seventeenth Century history and literature" is not convincing. We know that Hawthorne studied and used local 17th century New England historical sources and pondered the role of his ancestors there, and that he was interested in some now-standard 17th century English writers. But that hardly establishes that he ever read beyond these interests or knew Digby's scientific writings in the original (or that they were even locally available). We cannot assume that Hawthorne knew and used everything our research can discover today and that everything ended up on some single, integrated level.

As a literary treatment of the history of science, Gene's paper requires several skills. Obsolete science, pseudoscience, fundamentalism, and alchemy are not the same. Calling Digby a 17th century "scientist/alchemist" in the first paragraph is to tread on slippery ground. The establishment of classical mathematics, physics, astronomy, and chemistry in the 17th century depended on the rejection of Biblical fundamentalism and medieval alchemical quests and the adoption of natural laws which better explained the growing body of observational data in the physical sciences. Some explanations, such as the famous theory of phlogiston, were quickly rejected. Others survived until they were replaced in the 20th century by relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos and complexity theory. But the classical period in the life sciences of botany and biology came in the late 19th century -- after Hawthorne, who was especially sensitive to the fragile frontiers of contemporary work in progress in the life sciences. But his use of this subject was largely metaphorical and allegorical, perhaps due to his tendency to regard all the life sciences as inherently or potentially dabbling with the supernatural secrets of nature. (I won't go further here into the question of Hawthorne as science fiction.)

What was the Digby circle, and what was its relation to the supernatural? I find no characterization of Digby as interested in the supernatural in any of the recent handbooks I consulted, such as Benet, the Columbia Encyclopedia, or the Oxford Companion to English Literature, some of which acknowledge the fame of his "powder of sympathy." But one older biographical dictionary (Lippincott, 1870) states that he was "reputed to be versed in occult philosophy." Does each age re-invent its own Digby? It might be interesting to trace how Digby is depicted in biographical summaries, from the eighteenth century Biographica Brittanica (1778-93) to the nineteenth century Dictionary of National Biography.

One of the problems in Digby research is that to some extent he lived in the 17th century but because of delayed publications he became a 19th century figure. Aubrey's Brief Lives remained in manuscript until 1813, when portions were first published by 19th century editors. Digby's own Private Memoirs did not appear until 1827. Possibly some additional attention was given to Digby by the prominence of his descendant, Kenelm Henry Digby, a medieval enthusiast, who actively published from 1828 to 1842 on medieval culture, religion, and poetry and later strongly influenced the Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets. Hawthorne's use of Digby seems in keeping with these 19th century Romantic, Victorian, and Transcendentalist revivals of him.

Curiously, there was a recent Digby revival in the 1990s, which is worth looking at. Davida Rubin's Annotated Bibliography is the first complete description of his works (San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1991). Roger Pooley's English Prose of The Seventeenth Century (Longman, 1992) makes Digby the signal author of Part Two of his anthology for his contributions to the new scientific milieu. Michael Ayers's Seventeenth Century Philosophy (Routledge, 1997) regards Digby as the most significant formerly excluded figure to be added to the field in the last 30 years. Digby is now included in the Galileo Project on the history of Science. His literary manuscripts are now available on microfilm from the British Library in a collection of 109 reels among standard 16th and 17th century authors. Digby has also entered the popular imagination, appearing more than 100 times on the Internet, where we can find such oddities as his recipe for cheese cake and his remarks on tea, quoted by the Stash Tea company (I'll be watching for them on the tags of Stash Tea bags).

The Digby who emerges from these studies of the last decade, like the Digby sketched in recent reference books, is a rationalist and mechanist, a spokesman for the rising new science, who advanced atomic theories of matter. This is opposite to the Digby verging towards the supernatural in Hawthorne. Digby apparently joins Hawthorne's gallery of scientists favoring the head over the heart, who can be used in a symbolic, metaphorical, and allegorical fashion, and whose portrayal derives more from early 19th century organicism than late 17th century naturalism.

The real Digby was interested in physical substances -- atoms eventually -- and in discovering the physical laws of nature which governed them. He worked from observation, experiment, and deduction. In Gene's paper the connections of Digby to Hawthorne's Aylmer in "The Birthmark" are said to be "more than just coincidence," and he claims that we see "the influence of Digby's ideas and theories regarding the processing of data by the mind and heart, the affects of the imagination, and the concept of sympathy." But Hawthorne uses the system of 19th century symbols, types, and metaphors for the correspondence of mind and body, which have their roots in scripture-based 17th century Puritanism. Digby's 17th century world looks elsewhere, to nature and reason.

Hawthorne's interest in science and pseudo-science remains a fascinating subject, but the conclusion in Gene's paper, that the "textual and circumstantial evidence" of Digby's influence on Hawthorne is "persuasive" in "The Birthmark" and The Scarlet Letter seems overstated. I don't think Hawthorne's writings would have changed if he had never heard of Digby.

Hawthorne's circle of "correspondents or associates" most directly suggests the Fellows of the Royal Society," but Digby was associated with three other sectarian groups. He was a Roman Catholic, a Royalist, and a neo-Aristotelian. He served the state as a diplomat (as his father had done) and as a naval commander, but despite a temporary conversion as an Anglican, he had to retire to France (where he met Descartes) during the English Civil War, remaining there until the Restoration. Possibly the worst Catholics in the eyes of English Puritans were those who had been Anglicans at one time, raising fears that there were secret Catholics everywhere. Hawthorne's ambivalence towards several religious sects, his unexpected criticism of Puritanism and sympathy for Roman Catholicism, is an important element throughout the Scarlet Letter.

Digby was a member of a group of Catholic philosophers in 17th century England who tried to modernize Aristotelianism, to rescue it from the hands of the medieval schoolmen by injecting into it the empirical methods of the New Science. As an allegorist, Hawthorne favored the rival methods of the 17th century Platonists. But the naturalistic, Cartesian Digby was so unfamiliar to Hawthorne that he transformed him into a fringe scientist suspected of belonging to a circle of supernaturalists.

Ironically, the current revival of long-forgotten 17th century English philosophers associates Digby with other unexpected figures, particularly William Chillingworth, a fellow Royalist and sometime Catholic who became a powerful exponent of Anglican Protestantism and vehement enemy of the Jesuits up to the time of his death in a Commonwealth prison in 1644. The reputation for relentless disputation of the real Chillingworth -- an Arminian who attacked the Catholics on one side and the Puritans and Calvinists on the other, and who espoused beliefs leading to a counter-attack by Jonathan Edwards -- may be one reason why Hawthorne used his name.

What I have done here is based on standard reference books I had at home and one Internet search, all starting points for a dialogue to add something new to our understanding of Hawthorne's use of Digby. I have not read the Alfred Reid article on Digby and the "Birthmark" or the Aubrey biography or any of the other works cited. I am proposing possible lines of inquiry for serious research I would be interested in seeing in a note or short article, but I am reporting here only on the most superficial preliminaries and starting points for such an article. I have not entered a library or done any serious research here.

The next steps in pursuing this matter are to better understand how and why the empiricist Digby was associated by Hawthorne with a circle of supernaturalists. Was Hawthorne simply opposed to all experimentation with living things? The history of science is full of examples of scientific illiteracy and ridicule of unsuccessful theories and experiments of the past. Hawthorne's position may have something to do with the three-sided debate of the 17th century between Puritans, Anglicans, and Catholics. Newton, a good Anglican, thought he was writing primarily to extol the glories and powers of God, not to prove him superfluous in a deistical universe. Seventeenth century science, philosophy, and theology were still pretty connected. Even for Hawthorne science and morality were inseparable in the 19th century reaction of organicism and intuition against the rationalism and naturalism of the New Science of the 17th and 28th centuries.

It is worth checking to see whether the real Chillingworth and the real Digby, both anti-Puritans and partisan Royalists embroiled in temporary conversions during the years of Catholic-Anglican strife in England, had some close connection with each other. In the process, some better understanding might emerge of Hawthorne's source or motive in connecting the two.